Zingers and barbs flew across the stage during Wednesday night’s Republican primary debate in Milwaukee, but one of the most attention-grabbing candidate quotes wasn’t even an attack.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old former biotech executive turned political newcomer, said what he imagined many viewers were thinking when they saw him: “Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage?”
If the line sounded familiar, it was because Barack Obama said nearly the same thing 19 years ago.
The future president, then an Illinois state senator, was tapped to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. The 17-minute speech, widely considered Obama’s political breakout moment, included a line about the transformational and inclusive power of hope that cut across generations and personal experiences, including his own. It was, as Obama said, “the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.”
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Ramaswamy’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to questions Thursday about why the Republican candidate invoked Obama on the debate stage.
The line came after Fox News moderator Bret Baier asked Ramaswamy why voters should choose Ramaswamy over better-known candidates. Afterward, rivals like former New Jersey governor Chris Christie seized on the link to Obama.
“The last person who stood up here saying, ‘What’s a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama, and I’m afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur standing on the stage tonight,” Christie said.
Following the Wednesday debate, Ramaswamy’s deputy communications director, Stefan Mychajliw, told The Washington Post: “Our candidate’s not the one that wrapped their arm around Barack Obama. Chris Christie was.”
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The reference was to a 2012 photo that’s been a recurring political headache for Christie: The then-governor of New Jersey is seen greeting the president on a tarmac in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy’s destruction and shaking his hand as Obama places his other hand on Christie’s shoulder.
Still, Ramaswamy’s decision to invoke a two-term Democratic president on a stage full of Republicans was an unusual choice for a candidate whose style and rhetoric in many ways hew closer to a different former president: Donald Trump.
Ramaswamy claimed climate change was a “hoax” (evidence and broad scientific consensus concur it is not) and vowed as president to stop funding Ukraine’s defense against Russia. They were the kind of fringe right-wing positions that made most of his fellow Republicans onstage balk — and bore striking similarity to how Trump as a political newcomer in 2015 embraced shocking or outrageous positions to make himself the center of attention, The Post’s Philip Bump noted in his analysis of the debate.
The move clearly paid off for Trump, and it appears to have worked for Ramaswamy as well. On Thursday morning, he was the candidate everyone was talking about.
Dylan Wells contributed to this report.
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